Category: My Research
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Social Network Applet
I’ve been busy writing, but recently played around with the Social Network Applet in Knowledge Forum that I blogged about in August 2006. Paul, one of the KF programmers who created this java applet, sent me documentation on the different functionality and helped explain some questions I had. I still have much to learn about…
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Fly too high, pay the price
One characteristic that many graduate students have, and people tend to use to describe me, is compulsiveness. I’m often compelled to delve deep into the literature, analyze data, or write on regardless of the rationality of the motivation. This characteristic is not constrained to academic work. Rather, it infects other arenas of my life. For…
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More on Activity Theory
While I waited for some feedback from Clare and Wendy on an episode of progressive discourse that I had drafted up (thank you), I finally got around to writing about Activity Theory. I’ve blogged about Activity Theory before, and I’ve been meaning to write up a section for my thesis since at least mid-November. It…
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Content analysis & sundry thoughts on writing
Previously, I’ve blogged on interrater reliability and percentage agreement. More recently, my rater and I achieved 87.5% agreement on segmentation of units of analysis, which gave me enough confidence to proceed in asking my rater to code the instances of online discourse data I selected to calculate interrater reliability for my thesis. This is nerve-wracking…
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Impediments to research
Betwixt the hours of three and five in the afternoon, two rather bothersome goblins appear under my desk, impeding my research progress. Witness this latest intrusion: Happy Hallowe’en!
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Rater training, percent agreement, & importance of context
Through a cough syrup-induced haze, I saw “23” in an Excel spreadsheet cell and panicked thinking it as the percentage agreement value. I’d been dreading calculating inter-rater reliability between my alternate rater’s and my own coding for practice notes all weekend day today for the fear of just such a result. Such is the anxiety…
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Interrater reliability (& the black walnut)
I’ve been preparing online discussion data for alternate coders to calculate intercoder or interrater reliability (IRR) in content analysis for my thesis. IRR can be defined as “the extent to which different coders, each coding the same content, come to the same coding decisions” (Rourke, Anderson, Garrison & Archer, 2001) Considered the primary test of…
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Research Design | Design-Based Research
Although I am still analyzing data, lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about thesis writing in general and writing up design-based research (DBR) in particular. Since I completed my methodology comps in spring 2004, at least a couple more special issues on design-based research have been published, for example, Educational Psychologist 39(1) and Educational Technology…
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Knowledge Forum 4.6 Applets
Thanks to Chew Lee for encouraging me to try the third-party applets to analyze thesis data in my Knowledge Forum 4.6 databases. The applet list icon appears unobtrusively in the left-hand toolbar, and when you click on it, five tools are displayed: Contribution shows descriptive statistical data that I previously used ATK for: notes contributed,…
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Reading: Part I
I wanted to blog on what I’ve been reading, but I’ve been preoccupied with data analysis and writing. In NVivo, I’ve now organized some free nodes into tree nodes, refined my coding scheme, and begun synthesizing my paper-based journal scribbles into a more organized electronic copy. Nonetheless, I figured I better blog because the longer…